We'll collect the moments one by one/ I guess that's how the future's done
- Feist, 'Mushaboom'

Book-learnin'

I've gone all kooky because between my mother, my sister and I, we seem to have only brought books on vacation that had to do with old, dead English royalty. So I feel like calling everyone courtiers and knaves. So there.

I finally got around to reading The Shadow of Albion, the book I mentioned searching for earlier. Boy was I glad I spent all that mental energy thinking about that book! Oh wait, no. It was a pretty interesting story, but it bothered Becky that as I read it, I would point out all of the mistakes, things that didn't make historical sense, and inconsistencies (one character was another's brother, then her father, then her brother again).

However, all that did not turn me off from reading the sequel, Leopard in Exile. I had thought that The Shadow of Albion was laughable, but this was even better. Somehow the French got drastically worse, the inconsistencies were more frequent, and it went off on this kooky-hippie-magic tangent that freaked me out. The authors also used the words "wretched hive" and "scum and villainy" in the same sentence, as though we weren't automatically going to think of Obi-Wan Kenobi. What weirdos. I want to write them a letter. My dad suggested that they may have been under a deadline and may have submitted a rough draft to the publisher. Either that or they were taking a lot of drugs.

The Other Boleyn Girl was much better, but I kept getting confused while I was reading it. I had spent the past few days in the early 19th century, and now I was popped back to the 16th. After a while, all of English history starts to blend in together... always fighting the French, or allying with the French against Spain, or pretending to ally with Spain against France, while really allying with Denmark against Belgium...

Now I'm back in the 21st century for a few days, until I get on the plane with my flight-reading material, The Scarlet Pimpernel, which takes place in early 19th-century England and France. Eek.